“To be President of the United States,” wrote Harry Truman, “is to be lonely, very lonely. …” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that when the President works in the Oval Office, his elbows are resting on a unique memento of drama and endurance in the loneliest place on earth.

In the fall of 1855 the whaling bark George Henry out of New London, Connecticut, was lying to in the ice pack off the coast of Baffin Island, several hundred miles west of Greenland, when a heavy gale blew up from the northeast. When the weather cleared three days later, the George Henry found herself caught in a large, drifting floe. The crew could see land far across the mountains of ice but “could not say to what continent it belonged.” They would get few whales this season.

On the tenth of September, 1855, the George Henry ’s captain, James Buddington, sighted a large ship ten miles to the southwest. He climbed the rigging, trained a glass on the vessel, and said it looked abandoned. For several days the stranger was in sight, coming closer and closer to the George Henry . Some of the crew members said that at times it seemed the vessel was under full sail and working through the ice toward them.

Six days after the first sighting, when the ship lay within seven miles, Captain Buddington sent two mates and two crewmen to investigate. The four men started out across the ice early in the morning, but it was almost dark by the time they came near the ship. One of them, George Tyson, wrote: “As we approached within sight we looked in vain for any signs of life. Could it be that all on board were sick or dead? What could it mean? Surely, if there were any living soul on board, a party of four men traveling toward her across that hummocky ice would naturally excite their curiosity. But no one appeared. As we got nearer we saw, by indubitable signs, that she was abandoned.”

Once aboard, they found the cabin door locked. Tyson kicked it in. “This was no whaler,” he said, “that was plain. … Every thing presented a mouldy appearance. The decanters of wine, with which the late officers had last regaled themselves, were still sitting on the table, some of the wine still remaining in the glasses , and in the rack around the mizen-mast were a number of other glasses and decanters. It was a strange scene to come upon in that desolate place.”

A true sailor, Tyson promptly helped himself to a glass of wine. “Seeing it did not kill me,” the others “went for the wine with a will; and there and then we all drank a bumper to the late officers and crew of the Resolute .”